Complete newbie thickie here so, apologies if this is a dumb question.. Can someone explain what the difference is with the 0-8 settings? I just took a WAV file and tried compressing it with each setting and found that "0" produced the largest file size and "8" the lowest. I thought that "8" was the best so I would have thought it would be the largest!? *confused*

@ DJdust:The 0-8 is the compression setting. With FLAC there is no actual best, since all 0-8 settings are lossless, there is no audio data taken away. The only measurement then is the amount of compression that FLAC encoder can apply to the WAV. 0 being the least compression, 8 the most compression. Therefore, 0 has the largest files, 8 has the smallest files for FLAC. With compression there is usually a sacrifice of time. You probably noticed that the 0 setting took the least time, and the 8 setting took the longest.

@ DJdust:The 0-8 is the compression setting. With FLAC there is no actual best, since all 0-8 settings are lossless, there is no audio data taken away. The only measurement then is the amount of compression that FLAC encoder can apply to the WAV. 0 being the least compression, 8 the most compression. Therefore, 0 has the largest files, 8 has the smallest files for FLAC. With compression there is usually a sacrifice of time. You probably noticed that the 0 setting took the least time, and the 8 setting took the longest.

Actually, it seems to take the exact same amount of time really so, I guess I'll stick with setting "8" then and get the smallest file size!

@ DJdust:The 0-8 is the compression setting. With FLAC there is no actual best, since all 0-8 settings are lossless, there is no audio data taken away. The only measurement then is the amount of compression that FLAC encoder can apply to the WAV. 0 being the least compression, 8 the most compression. Therefore, 0 has the largest files, 8 has the smallest files for FLAC. With compression there is usually a sacrifice of time. You probably noticed that the 0 setting took the least time, and the 8 setting took the longest.

When I ripped the entire CD collection of my girl friend and mine, I used -5 because at the time there was a significant speed difference to -8 and disk space was of less concern. I had only second hand comparisons for the decoding speed for a Squeezebox but it did not appear to have any perceptible difference in the starting of songs.

it shaves a few gigabytes off my collection and the encoding times do not bother me at all as i only have to do it once(well, maybe a second time if a new version of FLAC comes out that makes my lossless music even smaller.). decoding times are also a non-issue as it only needs to be something other than realtime once in a blue moon when 5 austrailian aborigional mimes are pretending to be in an invisible box on the top floor of the eiffel tower.

What makes FLAC so widely used? Because it's asymmetric? Are people satisfied enough by compression ratio or is it price for high decoding speed?

For me it's the fact that it's open, and that's not just an ideological reason. Since I use Linux and FreeBSD, the programs I use tend to be open, as well; and that means that if a file format is closed, odds are I won't be able to use it well. Perhaps the ffmpeg team will wind up implementing reverse-engineered versions (as happened with ALAC), but why bother with that when flac and associated tools (like metaflac) are available?

If something open came along with a much better compression ratio, perhaps I'd switch; but then again, all my CDs are ripped and fit just fine on my 500GB array (with room to spare), so it probably wouldn't be worth the bother.

--best here. Why use any other setting when you can have the "best"? Or is Josh just using Jedi mind tricks on me?

As for using FLAC, I switched to it when I started using Linux because it was supported out of the box. It has served me well over the years and I see no reason to switch to anything else. I am really impressed by Wavpack and enjoy watching it grow, but FLAC FTW!

I tested it on a song and it is actually worse for that song, but less then 1/1000 (it just shows ratio=1,000) I've played around with those -A switched and other settings under --lax, but the gains are extremely small and encoding takes ages xD

I use -8, just because it is --best Indeed, it is probably not the worth the slowdown, but I don't care. New versions usually make much bigger differences.

I just started using flac and I used the -8....encoding or decoding speed is not a problem as long as I get the best result.actually the speed is quite fast with my pentium D desktop.... (encoding and decoding) and the filesize produced is not really big to me, much smaller than wav, which I used to back upmy song library before.